It’s viewer mail day. Steve Cook sent in a link to another fire engine maker, Pierce Manufacturing. Their site even has screensavers and wallpaper. Pierce was founded in 1913 in Appleton, Wisconsin and is now a division of Oshkosh Truck Corp. Dave Faris (who had been taking lots of nice photos with his PenCam until it, oops, broke) sent a link to Sensiva which allows you to draw gestures to execute commands. You can create your own gestures or use the ones they include. It’s like a macro language of gestures. Neato. (I do have other email I haven’t had a chance to process yet; thanks for writing and sorry for the delays.)

A very belated thanks to Justin Henry who sent me an article that condemns the re-use of plastic water bottles. As you may recall, I’d been carting around the same bottle for an indeterminate amount of time. The article cites a study that found high levels of bacteria in re-used bottles. You could wash them, but the typical throwaway bottles are not designed for washing; the openings are too narrow (I suppose you could use a bleach solution instead). The bacteria discovery didn’t bother me much (I would be as lazy about washing any bottle, re-useable or not), but I did some further research and found a greater issue: “non-food grade plastic bottles made of polyethylene terephthalate can break down or leach with the addition of water, light and warmth.” This comes from a Dr. Dean Edell article on water bottle re-use. It bothers me more that I may be ingesting chemicals that my body will absorb. So I went to REI and got a Lexan bottle. It actually does fit in my purse — it’s a tight squeeze though.

I just discovered Yahoo!’s Buzz Index, which tracks the popular items in their search logs. It’s a good way to catch up with what’s on the minds of the masses. This week: “Harry Potter mania has fans going to see movies just to catch the trailer for the upcoming film.”

Here’s more than you ever wanted to know about The Red Dwarf Theme Song, including ring tone versions for cell phones, parodies, and plenty of downloadable audio files. Most useful and amusing are parody lyrics of nutshell descriptions of each season. Time for some mango juice!

It is a strange, eerie feeling to see something you haven’t seen in a long time that you used to see all the time. That was the feeling I had when I ran across a page describing how to make braided barrettes. Everybody and their sister used to wear these back when many of us were in preppy Izod shirts, turtlenecks, and monogrammed sweaters. Bangs and two braided barrettes that matched your clothes. Pink & green, often. Hmmm… this eerie feeling is not turning into a nostalgic warmth.

Some days I start feeling kinda jaded about the “web”. Then a new concept comes and whacks me in the face and I sit up and take notice again. This time, to be precise, it hit me in the ear. The Silophone is a project that uses a huge grain elevator to transform sounds with its ultimate reverb. Specs: “reinforced concrete, 200 metres long, 16 metres wide and approximately 45 metres at its highest point. The main section of the building is formed of approximately 115 vertical chambers, all 30 metres high and up to 8 metres in diameter.” It’s in Montreal (thus the “metre” measures). What is so very cool about the setup is that you can upload sound files and hear them played to you live, via the magic of the Internet (and RealAudio). Thousands of sound files, some juvenile (cuss words), many a reflection of popular culture (Buffy bits, South Park songs), have been uploaded by the web-going public and played back.

When I first hit the site, someone(s) was merrily playing away, but I was soon left alone to try out the reverb by myself. What I’d really like to do is blast Beethoven’s 5th or Spybreak! (from The Matrix’s lobby shootout), but I’d have to do some editing (there’s a 1mb file limit). Instead I settled for the Simpson’s StoneCutters’ song, which I had handy. Of course listening from inside the silo itself is probably no comparison to a web broadcast. Hmmm, I think I’ve got a Tuvan throat singing mp3 somewhere. (And I really hope they don’t get dinged for having illegal music files on their site.) (via Yahoo’s Daily Picks)

I’ve noted some recent commentary on “mouse gestures” in the Opera browser and the game Black & White (sorry, I’m too tired to dig up links and references). The idea of gestures came up back when I was doing pen user interface programming at GRiD. The use of pie menus was often discussed as being ideal for the pen interface. You’d tap the screen and/or click and a nice round menu comes up around the point you touched, and every selection is equidistant from where your pen is. Beautiful for Fitt’s Law. No dragging down two inches to get to your selection. Where do gestures come in? Well, the pie menus would be multilayered, so picture your top level “File, Edit, View, etc” menu being in a circle, and when you pick “File”, you’d get “New, Open, Close, etc” in the next circle. Once you learn where everything is, your menu picks get faster and faster and basically become equivalent to gestures. I remember doing a bit of implementation on a pie menu system … I did a lot of math to get those darn circles and pie slices to come up where I needed them to. But it was a good learning experience, even if it didn’t go anywhere. Nowadays, people are experimenting with Java ones and sometimes I see psuedo pies in computer games.

Via (always awesome) Follow Me Here, a nifty article on the acoustics of concert hall design. Creating a large space suitable for classical performances of all kinds is a task that seems more of an art than science. The career-denting tale of Beranek’s failure at Lincoln Center’s Avery Fisher Hall is told. During my tour of Lincoln Center (that would be a regular tourist type tour, not, alas, a concert tour), the guide explained how the hall was encapsulated away from the outer walls so that street noise would not penetrate. And she also described the various solutions they had tried in their attempts to fix the acoustical problems, one of which was a set of “clouds” hanging from the ceiling. Controlling reverberation is the key to a good hall design. At MIT’s Kresge Auditorium, they have a system of microphones hanging from the ceiling on long cords above the orchestra. The microphones were spaced only a few feet apart and there were a lot of them. And we often set them swaying back and forth with an accidental (usually!) whack of a violin bow. The sound gathered by the mikes was played back on a slight delay to create an artificial reverb. Supposedly it worked quite well, but I haven’t been in the audience for a concert to hear it myself. I just remember thinking “it figures that MIT used an electronic solution.”

Does this ring any bells? “Now you know my name is Simon, and the things I draw come true.” And no, I’m not talking about the Saturday Night Live parody with Mike Myers in the bathtub. “Simon in the Land of Chalk Drawings” was first shown in the U.S. on Captain Kangaroo. I’ve had the theme song stuck in my head on and off for 25 or so years. Simon would draw people and other things on his special blackboard and then climb over the garden wall and interact with what he had drawn. Simon himself was animated, but he looked more 3-D than the characters he drew himself. Plus they were more chalky looking. Over the years, Simon and Harold (he of the purple crayon) got a little mixed up in my head, but the theme song stayed true to Simon.

Bay Area residents take note: the Palo Alto Square Theatre has received an eviction notice from their landlord, Equity Office Properties. This is the theatre on the corner of El Camino Real and Page Mill which shows excellent non-mainstream films (and is currently showing the almost mainstream “Crouching Tiger..”). Equity tried to evict the theatre in 1996, but the public fought back successfully. They have been in a month-to-month situation since then. The theatre is one of the most successful in the Landmark chain. According to the Landmark Northern California district manager: “There’s not a theater in the United States that pays market rate for rents. Landlords either want to be in the movie theater business and contribute to the culture of the country or they want to make a buck.” The complex is zoned for a theatre, so I don’t know how Equity plans to get more money by evicting a paying business and letting the site sit idle. Surely they weren’t losing money on it? Are they going to replace it with a higher grossing chain? Or battle the zoning and try for office space? Have they seen all those “for lease” signs appearing up and down El Camino Real? A Save the Square web site has been set up where patrons are encouraged to send their comments to Equity.